Much has happened in the five months since I last posted. Mainly, Asher Kachka joined our family four months ago—an accomplishment compared to which Hothouse is dust in the wind. Bookwise, there was a visit to Andover, MA, for a long interview with Dean Velvel of the Massachusetts School of Law. And on Saturday, February 15 at 11:30 am, I’ll be giving a talk as part of the Savannah Book Festival—at the Jepson Center boardroom if you happen to be nearby. We’re delighted to be down South (Asher too, on his first plane trip), and to have survived a harrowing Snowmaggedony day at Kennedy International Airport. Thank you Jetblue, and thank you to the Savannah Book Festival for putting me in the company of so many authors that have so many more readers than I. Do check out the website of this gloriously varied book fair, set in a beautiful town.

I distilled some lessons for writers based on Hothouse for Poets & Writers. It’s print-only, alas, but it boils down to: Be a diva when you have to be, but never a snob.

Just in time for the Frankfurt Book Fair, its trade paper Publishing Perspectives runs a very nice piece on the book from journalist Dylan Foley, who introduced me to a great neighborhood coffee/lunch spot, Lincoln Station, in the process of interviewing me.

I had a wonderfully freewheeling conversation with Lewis Frumkes, a beloved local interviewer of authors and artists–albeit a bit laid back, hence the lack of a link to his latest show on WPAT-AM, where I’m said to be featured. Stay tuned!

My reading at the Half King on September 9 went well I think; the three-cheese mac-n-cheese was a highlight as always. But catch me at the Brooklyn Book Festival next Sunday, where I’ll be talking with Janet Groth, onetime longtime New Yorker employee and author of The Receptionist, a memoir of her time there that might even make Roger Straus blush. Titled “Publish and Perish?”, it’ll be moderated by insightful publishing reporter Motoko Rich at 3 p.m. on September 22 at the Brooklyn Historical Society Library, 128 Pierrepont Street.

Future events will take me to Hartford, Boston, Savannah, and a small class of impressionable journalism students at the New School, but only after a month or more of pure, unadulterated baby time, which I’m very much looking forward to. (No time for Twitter, I’ll be happy to say.) Until then, read the book!

I first discovered Thomas Pynchon’s V. on the fiction bookshelf of a Midwood branch of the Brooklyn Public Library at age 15, while visiting my grandparents nearby. I was immediately, irrevocably hooked. Two of my goals in life have been to interview Vladimir Nabokov’s son and to find out as much as I could about Pynchon. One out of two, in this case, is pretty good.

I’m very excited to see this go out into the world, after a couple of months of interviews and archival research and even a few round-trip drives between Burbank and Pasadena (long story). If anyone enjoys reading it as much as I enjoyed reporting and writing it (not likely), I’ll be intensely happy.

And a wonderful review in The Wall Street Journal (behind a pay wall) from FSG alum Paul Elie—thoughtful and eloquent on the importance of FSG independently of his coverage of my book. Which is really the best I could wish for.